Charlie Daniels isn’t the kind of guy to tell country music’s youngsters how to make music.

“Only if they ask,” said the country legend, chuckling as he looked back on 55 years in the business. “What they want to know is how to last this long.”

Fans will see his answer in action Tuesday, July 16, when he and Kari Lynch opens the Chesaning Showboat Music Festival concerts at 6 p.m. in Showboat Park. Tickets, available at the box office at 218 N. Front, by calling 989-845-3056 or online at StarTickets.com, cost $75, $40, $30 and $20.

“I can’t imagine life without music,” Daniels said, calling from Houston. “But music isn’t enough. You have to entertain people; you need to keep them interested and have a good time doing it.”

Fortunately, Daniels said, he learned from the cornerstones of country music such as George Jones, Jimmy Rodgers, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams and Merle Haggard.

“You had no trouble identifying them because they had their own signature style. They didn’t play the sound of the day,” he said. “I had my own heroes, Earl Scruggs and Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, who started me looking at things in a different way.”

His new album, “Hits of the South,” pays tribute to still another branch, Southern rock.

“When you play with people like the Marshall Tucker Band, you pick up on what’s the natural music of their lives,” Daniels said. “It’s not a genre – Lynyrd Skynyrd is definitely rock and the Allman Brothers have the blues – but the lifestyle of people coming from the same social-economic class, eating the same food, knowing what to ask and how to ask it.

“But even people with no connections can have fun with it. It’s fun to have that kind of freedom in music.”

That means you’re likely to hear one or two of his songs in a Fourth of July compilation and to see a lot of those youngsters lending a hand at his annual Scholarship for Heroes fundraisers.

“That one’s a labor of love,” Daniels said. “You go into the military when you’re 19 or 20 and you’re thinking when you’ll open that hardware store or buy that farm. But if you’re injured, if you lose limbs, you let go of those dreams.”

Lipscomb University’s Yellow Ribbon program, by providing education and peer support, gives them another chance, and several years into the program, Daniels never tires of seeing the light return to the vets’ eyes.

“Unless you’ve gone through war, you can’t understand what they’ve been through,” he said. “But you can do something to help those who do understand.”

Speaking of never getting tired, does he ever tire of singing “Devil Went Down to Georgia”?

“No, ma’am, I don’t,” he said, chuckling again. “I’m going to sing it better tonight than I did last night, and it will sound even better when I get to Chesaning, but it isn’t perfect yet.”